Monday, August 25, 2008

Four young women simultaneously channeling the spirit of the early World Serpent releases and no-wave kick up a hypnotic racket on this disc, burning through twelve tracks in approximately 31 minutes. Dominated by endlessly circling drums, churning guitars with a sound like poison gas, mutant basslines, and vocalist Amber Alert! yowling like a cheerleader on a bad mix of speed and acid, the first half of the album sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well -- it's all chaos and madness soaked in diseased reverb, bathed in noise and swaddled in sick frequencies. This is seriously one of the strangest-sounding albums I've ever heard, with EQ-diddling and mutant efx dialed to such extremes as to create the sound of a band performance being transmitted from a different universe. (Bobb Bruno of Goliath Bird Eater mastered the album and Weasel Walter mastered it, which probably explains a lot about the deliberately fucked-up sound.) Arab on Radar would have been pleased to make an album that sounded this sick. The second half of the album consists of several remixes by Weasel Walter, Sunshine Militant Childrens Hour, Ops Spirits, Qulfus, and Blanketship, and those remixes just take the whacked-out songs to another level of adulterated sonic blasphemy. Black metal's answer to the Scissor Girls? Well, something like that, anyway. It'll definitely fuck with your inner ear, that's for sure.

Ahhhhh, Hatewave... appreciated by so few, misunderstood by so many, and eagerly fanning the flames of outrage at every opportunity during their brief existence. The band that was banned from The Empty Bottle in Chicago after performing a show with the legendary Japanese torture-porn video GUINEA PIG: FLOWER OF FLESH AND BLOOD playing behind them. The band whose self-titled LP on Up Jumps the Devil Records (later reissued on cd with bonus tracks by tUMULt ) was rejected for distribution by Southern Records UK for being "digusting" and "misogynist." The band noticed (if not necessarily appreciated) by many simply for the inclusion of drummer Weasel Walter (The Flying Luttenbachers, more other bands than you have fingers and toes to count). They broke up in 1999, but thanks to the swell folks at Apop, you can now hear the earliest (as in pre-Walter) incarnation of the band, featuring Nondor, Wigpaw, and Sasha Tai. (If you're dying to hear the 1996 demo featuring Angst and Weasel Walter, you can download it here.) Blink and you'll miss it, though; they grind their way through ten tracks in twelve minutes. So how does it sound? Well, loud, fast, and totally primitive, pretty much -- the liner notes state that it was "recorded by HATEWAVE on bad equipment in threadbare conditions on drugs," and that's a fairly accurate assessment. It's still a highly entertaining listening experience, with a lo-fi grindcore aesthetic welded to ridiculously technical guitar thrashing and supersonic drums, plus plenty of "vocals" that waffle between hideous retching and high-pitched caterwauling. It probably helps to have a sense of humor to get behind this. And since this is Hatewave, the cover art is quite rude. Not every hipster's cup of tea, to be sure, but Hatewave fans and porno-grind enthusiasts (who are all used to lo-fi recordings anyway) will want to check this out.

I like Hum of the Druid so much that I'm going to ignore the fact that the label doesn't list the album's playback speed, something a lot of labels seem to forget these days, and a habit that really annoys the hell out of me. (For the record, the album sounds pretty swell at 45 or 33-1/3. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be played at 45 RPM, though.) The A-side opens with distant, reverb-heavy machine noise that eventually grows much louder and grittier; the volume and dynamics ebb and flow as the sound varies from tortured machine noises, squelched vocal shrieks, and crunchy chunks of sandpaper noise.Unlike a lot of noise artists, HOTD's soundscapes are more about the flow of sound and juxtaposition of textures than pure white noise (although there's plenty of that from time to time). This is bad-trip soundtrack music, the sound of machines being tortured in the name of art, and it's pretty ominous-sounding without being strident or artificially aggressive. The piece on the B-side shares much of the same aesthetic, but is considerably louder and crunchier, and incorporates more feedback. It's a much denser piece than the first one, with cascading and omnipresent waves of rumbling noise that forms an ocean of sound through which static, feedback, and high-pitched wailing sounds rise and fall, coming and going, with vaguely rhythmic noises occasionally pulsing deep down in the sonic soup. The packaging is just as swell as the music, with stippled drawings by HOTD purveyor Eric Stonefelt on the cover and the inner insert, and the vinyl is nice and heavy. This is a good one.

Here we have Locrian, two avant-noise dudes from Chicago, and Colossus, one ambient-noise dude from New Hampshire, each taking up one side of this fifty-minute cassette. Both bands are fond of drone and noise, but deploy their sonic armaments in different ways, and both sides are excellent. The Locrian side is one long track ("Visible / Invisible") recorded live on WLUW; it opens with bell-like tones and vague noise and hum in the background, and over a period of approximately 25 minutes, feedback and drones make stealthy appearances as the track steadily grows into a thick wall of droning noise. The Colossus side consists of two tracks; the first, "An Act of Light," opens in loud fashion with a stuttering, repetitive drone figure that is augmented by other drones to create a hypnotic fluttering sound that grows deeper and richer in tone as the piece progresses. "Drink Deep" is my favorite of the three tracks on this cassette, with deep harmonic drones that buzz and reverberate with a sound that's both mellow and massive, like a series of drones converging in harmonic radiance in the cavernous space of an abandoned cathedral. Field recordings (including snatches of conversation) appear in the mix as well, adding a human element of sorts to what would otherwise be a blissed-out space drone. All three tracks are perfect in their combination of noise and drone. Hardcore droneheads shouldn't miss this. Limited to 100 copies.

Locrian are a noise-loving duo from Chicago and Continent are a metallic group from Arizona, and how they came to be on the same cassette is anybody's guess, but the dramatic difference in their styles makes this release all the more entertaining. Locrian's side consists of one 13-minute track, "burying the carnival," a droning slice of sheet-metal noise and squealing recorded live on WLUW earlier this year. Shrieking, bleating noises erupt over an unnerving, hellish ambient drone like missiles being fired from a glacier; the atmospheric sounds encompass feedback, proto-freejazz skronk, and distorted harmonic overtones, with results that are impressively ominous and bleak. The Continent side features four heavy tunes full of thrashing guitar angst that flow into lumbering, slo-mo death metal riffs and a vocalist who sounds like he's expressing his anger by heaving up a lung. It's nothing you haven't heard before, and the murky production obscures the message a bit (in true metal demo fashion), but they make up for these minor quibbles with serious chops and ferocious energy. That the vocalist sounds like he's having to be restrained from beating someone to death with his microphone is a big plus. Limited to 100 copies.

What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine, but whatever it is, it's probably the product of heavy drugs (or too much time in art school, which amounts to same thing). Led by Gregory Jacobsen, the band's obsessions with scatlogical artwork and demented presentation (sort of like an extremely devolved punk-metal version of cabaret music) suggest roots in performance art, and the outfits they wear on stage don't do much to disprove that theory. It's musically complex (not to mention totally out-there) performance art, though, owing as much to Kurt Weill and Burt Bacharach as to any form of rock, and far more humorous than most acts swimming in the Chicago art-rock scene. Six extremely peculiar manifestions of art-rock as burlesque surrealism unfold in about twenty minutes, and you'll find it either oddly captivating or completely inexplicable. I suspect the sonic aspect of the band is only half the fun, but you'll either have to live in Chicago or see them on tour to find out for sure.

They come from Baton Rouge, which isn't too far removed from NOLA, so if "Eyehategod" is the first thing that comes to mind, well, there's a good reason for that. This is classic, fuzzed-out sludge / doom very much in the vein of Eyehategod, fueled by nasty fuzz guitar soaked in gasoline, leviathan basslines capable of making refrigerators levitate, assloads of alienation, and lots of pained shrieking. Like a lot of Louisiana doom bands, their sound is basically the blues slowed down to 16 RPM and played through a towering stack of amplifiers set on maximum fuzz; this is music made to be felt as much as heard, and they certainly have a tremendously physical presence. The six long, lumbering tracks here are periodically leavened with keening feedback, and at times the heaviness factor resembles a black hole collapsing. Their strategy most of the time is to share their alienation by erasing the listener's face one slow, tortured riff at a time, but they throw a few curve balls from time to time; on "The Work Ethic Myth," they incorporate uneasy waves of dissonance into their brontosaurus stomp, and on "Belt of Fire to Guide Me, Cloak of Night to Hide Me," they open with a relatively clean bass line and borderline jazz drums before descending into subsonic audio hell. On "Burning Black Coals and Dark Memories," the guitar has a dark, psychedelic feel at the beginning, and the initial riffing of "The Road of Many Names" is much faster than anything else on the record (although the tempo slows to a crawl soon enough). There's nothing spectacularly new happening here -- this is standard-issue doom -- but it's very, very convincing and supremely relentless in its soul-crushing intensity.

I can't find any concrete information on the label, but this is certainly an interesting compilation, with some well-known names (Grunt, Emil Beaulieau, Prurient, and the Grey Wolves) along with the lesser-known and new entities. This is raw stuff, mainly power electronics and harsh noise, with fourteen tracks by fifteen artists (the track "Awake!" is a collaboration between the Grey Wolves and Werewolf Ensemble). Standout tracks include 88MM's "Funeral March of the Cosmological Principle," Brethren's "Zionist Axiom," the aforementioned Grey Wolves / Werewolf Ensemble track, FFH's "Disposable Women," Pain Nail's "Watchtower." The most punishing tracks are the harsh noise assaults of Griz+zlor ("Statue003") and Fleshobedience ("Defectives") and Deathkey ("Monolith"). There's nothing flaccid here, either; this is a strong collection of tracks, offering plenty of variety in the ongoing sonic mayhem. It's too bad there's so little information available about the label, because they've done a really good job of assembling this noise sampler. Comes with a 16-page booklet with one page of art and (sometimes) information about each band. Noise completists will want it for the tracks by the more well-known bands, but the more obscure ones are often the best thing about the cd.

More piercing, throbbing drones from Lisa Cameron (ST-37, The Devil Bat). As usual, the setup is minimal but the drones are surprisingly immense. The cassette's first side is a long piece recorded at Yeast by Sweet Beast in 2007, with Lisa using a snare, lap steel, bowl, and magnet to create lengthy and hypnotic drones and peals of feedback that undergo subtle tonal variations over extended stretches of time. The unorthodox act of turning the snare and lap steel into vibrating feedback resonators results in pure-tone drones that slowly but surely mutate from one sound into another, and the slightest movement of the magnet or bowl results in startling volume jumps as well. There's no song construction happening here, just the pure power of tone and sound combined with unpredictable feedback harmonics, and the sound evolves into different harmonic and rhythmic elements over time. Later in the piece, there's some nice distorted clanging to go along with the shuddering feedback drone. The flip side of the cassette is another live action recorded at Circle in April, 2007, with one instrument missing (the magnet) and a moderately different (and more rhythmic) approach to the blown drones. This sounds closer to machine noise than freeform feedback madness; the segments are no less hypnotic and droning, but far more rhythmic and occasionally downright caustic in tone. The piece also ends really abruptly, making it a sudden shock to the system when the vibrating cathedral of noise shuts its doors without warning. You'll probably have to contact Lisa directly (see the link below) to get your hands on one of these.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

The poop sheet bills this short (one 31-minute track) disc as "solo instrumental ambient guitar," but it's really more aligned with minimalism than ambient -- Collier opens with lonesome extended single notes that hold and drone, then over time adds and subtracts more notes to create harmonic overtones and clusters of sound that stand out more than you might expect because the background is so stark. The sound is alternately beautiful and disconcerting, but always plaintive and even mysterious. Bell-like tones emerge from the wavering drones, along with squeaks and scrapes, but the barely-shifting drone remains largely constant. This is not music for the impatient; because there is no real rhythm or any kind of immediately recognizable sense of progression, it seems to creep along. Toward the end the multiple tones take on a more rhythmic cast, growing more dissonant and noisier, but at no time does this ever turn into something you might call a pop song by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it remains a pure exploration of tone and drone, minimalist in execution but considerably more ambitious in intent.

Chris Douglas used to record under the name O.S.T., with a sound that was part of the early wave of electronic dance music. Since the retirement of that project, he has recorded under other names, Dalglish being the most recent. The fourteen tracks on this disc are definitely rooted in industrial / electronic dance music, but at times owe as much to noise -- the beats (when they exist) are unquestionably derived from techno, but the sounds that ride over those beats are a shifting assembly of textured drones and pure noise. Sometimes the noise is rhythmic (on "Tishm," for instance, where the beats are augmented by a rhythm track of crusty glitches) and sometimes it's processed to provide ambience and texture, but either way, it's always there. This is hardly the first attempt to merge noise and beats, but the execution here is good; the beats are stripped-down and spare, leaving plenty of room for clouds of unidentifable sound and esoteric noises. Machine noises are a big factor -- many of the rhythmic elements sound like distorted loops of machinery forced to serve the tyranny of the beat -- and the ambient noise generally has a pleasantly crunchy texture that neatly erases any hint of sterility. The tracks are all instrumental, and the overall sound is dark and brooding without descending into campy histronics. The digipak artwork is all cosmic smoke and the lights of distant galaxies, which is fitting, since this is essentially the electronic equivalent of space rock. It's esoteric and enigmatic, sure, but it's also an excellent marriage of beats, ambience, and glitch electronics.

I know absolutely nothing about this band -- even with the mighty power of Google at my disposal, information on the band appears to be largely nonexistent -- but I can see how they would have serious appeal to noise cultists. For one thing, the band is a collaboration between Nolan Throop of Kakerlak and Dan Johansson of Sewer Election; for another, this cd is the collection and reissue of their first three cassettes, all horribly obscure and now out of print. The sound itself is one of catastrophic noise mayhem, full-blown, full-tilt power electronics violence turned up to maximum levels of earhurt and sounding like an endless explosion of harsh audio torment. The cd is divided into three tracks -- one for each cassette -- and they're each a crazed and relentless tsunami of noise with no redeeming social value. Each one is approximately 20-25 minutes long and it's difficult to tell which is more obnoxious (my vote is for the second track); they're all certainly wallowing in the same sonic gore-pit favored by the likes of Macronympha and Knurl, that's for sure. Fans of pure unremitting harsh noise hell should be all over this. The disc is on Gaping Hole (a highly appropriate name, given the pornographic nature of the cover graphics), but is being distributed by SNSE for an entirely reasonable price.

Originally released in 1997 on Osmose Productions as LIVE IN GERMANIA, this is a live recording of the band's "Heaven Shall Burn" tour, recorded at four different venues in Germany. The twelve-track setlist is taken mainly from their first four albums, culminating in a blinding cover of Destruction's "Total Disaster." Since it's a live document showcasing material from several different albums, it should come as no surprise that it's considerably more dynamic and varied than their studio albums, which should be good news for the haters who whine about their tendency toward monochromatic blasts of sound, but Marduk fans fond of their explosive tendency toward aggression will find much to worship here. "Darkness It Shall Be" in particular is such a frenzied, excessive sonic attack that it borders on sheer noise, and tracks like "Infernal Eternal," "Untrodden Paths (Wolves Pt. 2)," and "Legion" aren't far behind in the aggression sweepstakes. The variety comes in the form of atypically melodic tracks like "Materialized in Stone," the fluctuating tempos of "On Darkened Wings," and "Wolves," which features a guitar hook that's actually catchy (at least until it's largely obliterated when everything steps up into overdrive and chaos). The sound is not bad at all for a live document (especially one by a black metal band) -- there are some murky moments, sure, but overall the sound is pretty respectable, and relatively consistent despite being taken from four different venues. The bonus content for the reissue is an accompanying DVD of the band's first live appearance outside Sweden, taken from a 1994 concert in Oslo, Norway and featuring six songs.

This was one of the first Marduk releases I ever bought, mainly for the rude S&M artwork; I'm pleased that the reissue's considerably revised graphics, while much darker and murkier, still retain the S&M theme. The original tracks are every bit as obnoxious and aggressive as I remember them being the first time around, albeit thicker and darker -- possibly a result of remastering -- and their cover of the Celtic Frost classic "Into the Crypt of Rays" is still one of the most aggressive Frost covers ever. In addition to the reconfigured graphics and remastering, the reissue includes two new tracks, both taken from the now out of print BLACKCROWNED box set. The first is a blackened, thrashed-out version of the Rolling Stones song "Paint it Black" (which could have been a disaster, but fortunately isn't); the second is a cover of the Misfits favorite "Earth A.D." that's even more manic than the original, if such a thing is possible. Their deeply perverse cover of the Stones song is reason enough to own this.

The band's sixth album, originally released in 1999 on Osmose Productions (their last release for the label), is probably their best-known release. It's also one of their most controversial (no small feat for a band dedicated to controversy), thanks to the "all war, all the time" theme that caused many to erronously label them an NSBM band. Musically, it remains one of the band's most manic and focused statements; with the exception of a mid-tempo beginning on "Scorched Earth," the introductory explosions of "Beast of Prey," and a couple of brief (very brief) respites here and there, the seven tracks from the original album are all ferocious exercises in pure, blinding speed, with ridiculously fast drums and knitting-needle guitars accompanied by Legion's caustic screech. It's true that the overall sound is severely monochromatic -- variety in songwriting has never been the band's strong suit -- but the songs themselves, with titles like "Christraping Black Metal" and "Fistfucking God's Planet," are punishing juggernauts of sonic excess played with unnerving abandon, all attitude and unparalleled aggression. This is violent, no-frills war metal, heavy as hell and so extreme that it borders at times on squalling white noise. The reissue adds two bonus tracks ("Deathride" and "Todeskessel Burland"), both of which sound like they could have been outtakes from the original album, and a fan-made video for the title track.

I am so old that I actually bought this band's first two albums (on vinyl, natch) when they were first released, way back in the early eighties. Hell, I'm so old that I was in college at the time. I know the band has had plenty of ups and downs since then, but it's good to see that their latest album is a fine return to the winning combination of catchy melodicism and crushing riffs that made that their first two albums so great. It's true that I still prefer original vocalist David Wayne (RIP) to their latest singer, Ronny Munroe, but that has less to do with any stylistic deficiency on Munroe's part and more to do with nostalgia on mine. He's a good singer in his own right -- perhaps a tad too operatic at times for my taste, though -- and just as importantly (maybe even more so), the guitar riffs are heavy and well-crafted; this is a no-frills, low-bullshit album, just like their early stuff. It is kind of strange to look at the personnel list and realize that guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof is the only original member left, but it sure doesn't appear to have had much impact on the band's sound; this is very much in line with their early sound, only with better production and improved songwriting. The ten tracks on this album range from pretty good to excellent; this is probably the most consistent album they've done since THE DARK. Let's hope the band fares better on SPV than they did on any of their earlier labels; an album this good by a band that's lasted this long deserves better than to get lost in the shuffle.

A trio composed of Ricardo Arias (bass-balloon kit), Miguel Frasconi (glass objects), and Keiko Uenishi (laptop computer), Object appears here with a live recording from the Sculpture Center in New York City, with one long track that is actually nine sections alternating in solo, duo, and trio formations. The unusual instrumentation gives the players access to some truly bizarre sounds, and the shifts from one player to more players means the density of sound comes and goes, depending on how many people are playing at any given time. Silence plays a big part in the performance, too -- strange sounds fade into stretches of silence as the players switch off, and the sounds they make when they are playing tend to be obscure and minimalistic. Frasconi in particular demonstrates that you can make some truly eccentric, even unnerving, noises with just a bunch of balloons. Since the performance is structured on the disc as one long track, it's hard to tell where one section ends and another begins, but there's definitely an ongoing progression from one set of sounds to the next, and each section evokes a different feel and mood. The sounds tend to be largely muted and subdued -- this is definitely not going to be mistaken for power electronics -- and the approach through much of the recording is one of methodical and deliberate pacing, often with sounds so quiet that you have to pay attention to tell what's happening. The "finale," in fact, is almost anticlimactic, with baroque and barely-perceptible sounds that gradually die away into nothingness. Peculiar... very peculiar.

Even by experimental standards, Marcelo Radulovich's music is pretty strange stuff. Frequently sounding like eccentric pop songs that are being hacked apart on the fly, his sonic creations tend toward fractured bursts of sound and cryptic lyricism that sound connected by only the barest of conceptual threads. On this particular album, there's a strong emphasis on strange vocal approaches -- many of the songs feature oddball choruses with staggered mass vocals and peculiar vocal treatments -- and obscure but catchy melodies with inscrutable, even interrupted, rhythms. His approach here combines the unpredictability and innovative sonic exploration of free-jazz and improvised music with the potentially catchy structures of pop music, with bizarre and mysterious results. Some of the material here is (conceptually, at least) reminiscent of the Cheer Accident avant-pop classic THE WHY ALBUM. With fourteen tracks on hand, there's plenty of variety in sounds and approaches, and the songs are mostly short (only two songs are over 3:32, and several are under two minutes), which means the strangeness of each track doesn't have much opportunity to wear out its welcome before moving on to the next burst of weirdness. Strange, very strange, but highly listenable.

Shelf Life -- CONCERNING THE ABSENCE OF FLOORS [Friends and Relatives Records]

The band is a collective of drone 'n skronk enthusiasts -- Bryan Day, Joseph Jaros, Luke Polipnick, Alex Boardman, and Jay Kreimer -- recording in different configurations, and the five tracks here are different explorations of the combination of near-random noisemaking and drone aesthetics. The unpredictable plinking and clanking provides a sense of texture to what would otherwise be a series of pieces centered around brooding electronic repetition and ambient drone; the pieces themselves vary somewhat in the application of different sounds and strategies, but in the end they are all united in the tendency to gravitate toward hypnotic repetition and mysterious, sometimes even blissful, clouds of drone. This is eerie stuff, sometimes verging on downright haunting, like the sound of ghost trains rolling through endless empty tunnels at night while electronic machinery pulses in the darkness. Often resembling a mutant form of free-jazz electronica, there's a cold, zoned-out feel to the proceedings that's at odds with the obviously human element of random surprise expressed through the unorthodox instrument abuse, which is a large part of what makes the album so interesting. Swell ambient sounds and a minimalist approach to repetition through the use of unusual textures doesn't hurt, either.

Originally released as a limited-edition cd-r, this vinyl version (limited to 300 copies) retains the moderately rude / mildly pornographic cover and adds mastering by James Plotkin (Old, Khanate, etc.) for maximum sonic punishment. With a penchant for damaged synth abuse and an aesthetic firmly rooted in the likes of Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend, Prurient, and violently abrasive power electronics in general, this is a short but potent sonic bloodbath; the songs are never more than a few minutes long at most, and with titles like "Man the Fuck Up, Faggot" and "Fuck First... Ask Never," you can tell they're confrontational without even dropping the needle. Once you do, though, the violence is total -- grim, dirty synth drones turn into full-on blasts of white noise and psychotic screaming designed to clear rooms, and fast. The four songs on the first side are short blasts of hate and ultraviolence that explode in bursts of chaotic white noise like the sound of buildings being demolished in slow motion; of the two "epics" on the flip side, the first ("Another Dead Walpole Kid") is filled with brooding synth angst and crusty noise in the background, whle the second, "To Catch a Predator," is built around bone-rattling amplifier hum and muffled shouting, with a sound that threatens to burst into audio immolation but never quite does. The self-destructive duo has been around long enough to churn out an impressive list of singles, limited-edition cd-rs, and compilation appearances, but this is their first "full-length" release (in quotes because the album is only about fifteen minutes long -- like I said, the songs are short). It's definitely worth hearing, especially if you're hep to any of aforementioned influences.

About Me

RKF is the guitarist for Korperschwache and former owner of Monotremata Records. He has been releasing and reviewing music since 1994. He lives in Austin, TX where he participates regularly in the underground noise and experimental music scene.